Dear Lifehacker,
I'm by no means an aspiring film director, but I've never been happy with the results when I shoot video on my phone, and sharing that video always seems more of a pain than it's worth. Help?

Sincerely,
Home Movie Hero

Dear HMH,

We totally understand the struggle of getting a good video out of your smartphone. Thankfully, shooting quality video with your smartphone is pretty easy, even if sharing those videos is a little more complicated.

Upgrade Your Video App and Make Sure You Have Enough Free Space

The default video apps are fine for taking a quick video in a well lit area, but you're better off with one of the inexpensive alternatives.

For iPhone, we likeVideo Camera+ because it supports multiple video quality settings, has composition guides, and video stabilization, but is still easy to use. It also comes with native Dropbox support for easy sharing with friends.

Unfortunately, there's a serious lack of video recording applications for Android that build…
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Regardless of which camera app you settle on, make sure you have enough free space left on your phone to actually shoot that video (iPhone: Settings > General > About. Android: Settings > SD Card and Phone Storage). HD video takes up a lot of space—around 76 MB per minute with the iPhone 4 camera—so make sure you clean up your Android or iPhone's storage before you shoot.

With the sun shining and bees buzzing in celebration of spring you've likely started…
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Steady Your Shot

The biggest reason smartphone video looks like junk is that your hand is probably unsteady. It's hard to keep your hands from shaking a little when you're filming, but both of the above apps have stabilization features that help correct for small shakes, so you can start there. Also, make sure you're holding the phone in landscape mode. Not only does your video look better, it's also easier to hold the phone steady.

Auto-stabilization can't correct everything though. To keep your hands steadier when you shoot, MacLife recommends you hold your phone with both hands and tuck your elbows close to your body.

If you're shooting professional video, you probably already have a pretty nice camera, but if…
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Use Microphones for Better Audio

The other big reason smartphone footage stinks is that the audio often sounds like you're filming in a tunnel. You can't do much to improve the audio on a software level, but if you really want to improve your sound quality you can do it with some hardware.

Camera phones have come a long way in the past few years, but they don't always take…
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On the iPhone, you can control exposure to a point. If you tap and hold a focus area on the screen before you record you'll lock in focus and exposure (you'll see AE/AF pop up on the bottom of the screen). This means when you're shooting video the camera will maintain the focus and exposure you set and will look a lot better. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a reliable way to do this across Android devices. If you have Ice Cream Sandwich you can lock exposure and focus on most Android phones with the same technique as the iPhone.

If you don't want to deal with Facebook or YouTube, your simplest solution is Socialcam. While Socialcam is a little creepy with its frictionless sharing on Facebook, it has a ton of privacy options. For instance, when you upload a video, you can set it to private, and then share it with a text message or email link. You can, of course, also share it to a variety of social networks or directly to your Socialcam followers, but the fact an entirely private sharing system exists is handy.

Ever since Google Docs started allowing file uploads of any type, it's been a great way to…
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Unfortunately, you won't find one single "best way" to share your video with friends. It depends on what you want to do with the video and who you want to see it. Hopefully now that you can shoot better video with your smartphone you'll be more likely to share it.